Through diverse practices, including film, installation, performance, and photography, Matthieu examines the symbolic and emotional aspects of situations and places, personal history, and collective memory.

One of his recurring themes is the nature of time. Fascinated by how and why a particular moment in time stands out and how it relates to specific points of arrival and departure, he foregrounds historical consciousness through multiple focuses on the present and crucial pasts.

Matthieu's work is a philosophical exploration of how the twists and turns of individual fates fit into theories of time, place, and the meaning of human lives. By asking himself these profound questions, his work becomes a balancing act between interconnectedness and the search for lost time, stimulating the audience's intellect.

Much like Proust’s “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu”’, Charneau depicts his journey through a symbolic search for truth with metaphors that enrich a collective pictorial language.

He often incorporates stills from Super 8 films and digital recordings into sequences, which appropriates cinema’s frame-by-frame format. More symbol and metaphor than narrative, it expresses his need to remember and record how one fragment of a single moment in time leads to the next.

Charneau's photographic approach, with its preference for using available light, blurring, and graininess, creates a timeless quality. Figures dissolve into shadow and film grain as timeless fragments of life, moments of enduring beauty that explore the tension between idealism and existential realities.

The complexity of Matthieu Charneau’s work is as much about the cycle of creation, destruction, and regeneration as it is about continuity and cosmic redundancy.

- Jimi Dams -